Loss
by JojoLightningfingers
Summary: He holds his brother's body as he slowly fades away. Not a yaoi. Davesprite and Bro Strider, after Bec is prototyped.


**I promised myself I would never Sadstuck so what did I do? I Sadstuck'd.**

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You're pretty sure you've never felt worse in your life. It's difficult to see Jack flying away, between the general darkness of LOWAS, your shades, and dizzying pain. Sitting up, insofar as it is possible to sit when you have a ghost-tail-whatever in place of legs, is a task that makes your head spin and your stomach boil and you want to just lay down and die but you can't because you are still needed and still important.

It takes fifteen seconds for your vision to stop being a fucked up mess of red static and agony and oh god that's your wing laying over there. The pain multiplies, stabbing the feathered stump of your now-severed limb the longer you stare at it until you have to look away.

You glance directly at the other body laying on the blue LOWAS surface, the one with the sword sheathed brutally in its chest. Your heart is in your throat before you can stop it from crawling up your neck and every wound pulses in unison. You feel sick and lightheaded all over again—you tell yourself that it's just blood loss; you're painting an orange snail trail with every drag that brings you closer to your brother's immobile form. If you had your other wing, a few flaps would bring you to him with a lot less pain than this requires. Your stomach feels ripped out—maybe it is, you do have a stab wound in that general location—but you suspect it's mostly due to the sight of Bro sprawled there. So vulnerable. So _defeated_. Striders don't get laid low, he'd told you once, except by other Striders.

Eventually you're at his side, every nerve in your body screaming. The urge to succumb to death is getting demanding. You've scraped your fingers bloody from hauling a hundred plus pounds of wings and dead weight with nothing but your hands because you can't fly and the bilious pain in the snake that is your body makes you want to throw up every time you so much as twitch. Your throat is constriced and you wonder if this is the start of your death throes; your cheeks are wet, but you can't remember being wounded on your face. Every muscle in your face seems bent on tightening and drawing back as far as it can go, twisting your expression horribly. Striders don't cry. _Striders don't cry_, you hear Bro telling you, when you were younger and had suffered a nasty cut at the end of his sword. He hadn't said it unkindly, you remember, had helped you bandage your arm and shoulder and ruffled your hair, and gone a little easier on the strifing until you'd mostly healed.

Your blood had been red, then.

Now it's dripping orange off your fingertips as you reach out for him, startlingly bright in this land of muted colors. Your limbs are nerveless except for the throb in the points of your digits that grows into an angry protest when you curl your hand around the back of his neck and lift his head up. You're still crying, tears falling off your chin and Bro's blank face wavering in and out of focus. You can't see his eyes behind his glasses and yours; you're dimly glad for that. You don't know if seeing him dead with his eyes open and stricken or dead with his eyes closed and peaceful would hurt worse.

Red is staining your body, and blooming in a macabre flower on his shirt around where the blade penetrated him, and streaming from the corners of his mouth. He looks dead, but he is not. His breath is still present, his skin is still warm. He's alive yet, but he's fading fast. Most other people would be stunned. You're not, you know it's because he's Bro, and a Strider at that. He knows you're there too; his fingers twitch and he makes a soft, rough noise in his throat.

He sounds too helpless, too unused to what you're seeing him as for you to handle. You're not deluding yourself, he's not getting up after this. You let your head fall on his chest, nicking your cheek on the sword on the way down, and just sob. You cry for him, because he's too far gone to do it himself and he won't anyway, and because this is your _brother_ who's dying, the guy who gave you your name and everything else about your self that you're proud of.

Bro moves. You can tell, even from where you're weeping bitterly into his collarbone, that it's taking him everything he has left to reach up and put his hand on your head. It's taking him everything but he gives a little more, because that's just how he's always worked. He gives enough to grind out four words, gritty with pain and thick with regret, but as warm and strong as he can make them while sitting on Death's doorstep.

"Be strong, little bro," he says, and you feel him squeeze his hand in your hair and you just stop thinking and stop caring that you're bawling, and that crying this hard is aggravating every injury you possess and threatening to pass you out. The hand that doesn't cradle him is twining its fingers with his in your hair, and all you feel right now is your brother dying, his breath shallowing, his heartbeat slowing, and his skin turning icy and grey.

And just like that, you are alone.

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**Inspired by a song/photoset on Tumblr; will link on request.**


End file.
